Friday, July 29, 2016

Movie Reviews: Bad Moms, Nerve, Cafe Society, Jason Bourne,

Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Life Animated

July wraps up with summer action, raunchy comedy and indie entries with a Sundance 2016 pedigree.

Woody Allen's latest melancholy period piece, Café Society(pictured), offers an uneven but acidic look at what people can lose of their souls while pursuing superficial success. The charming New Zealand comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople riffs on the familiar premise of a gruff loner forced into reluctant surrogate parenting, but soars on writer/director Taika Waititi's off-beat sense of humor. The Sundance documentary Life, Animated takes the rare but welcome step of making a person with a disability—here a 23-year-old autistic man taking tentative steps toward independence—the hero of his own story.

Andrew Wright finds the thriller Nervetaking the germ of a good premise about cyber-voyeurism and turning it into an achingly trendy exploitation flick.